Zero

I finished reading Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea this morning. It was a great read. Among other things, I learned that:

* The Babylonians' number system was base 60, and their notation obviously made sense to them, but not to me, because 1 and 60 were apparently represented by the same character.

* It was the Hindus who originally used the base-10 system that we call the Arabic numerals generally used today.

* Aristotle is to blame for fear of the number zero. His philosophy discounted the existence of nothing, or void. The Greeks were extremely afraid of nonexistence, to the point that it seeped into Christianity--which is why, when Dionysius created the Gregorian calendar, later revised by the Venerable Bede, he started with the year 1 instead of the year 0. Now we are forever confused, and just about everyone celebrated the turn of the millennium a year too early. Consequently, he also calculated Christ's birth about four years off.

* The Mayans had a much more interesting calendar. 18 months of 20 days: 0-19. Could you imagine writing zero as the date on your paper as a student?

* Pythagoras and his cult had people put to death for supposing the existence of irrational numbers, and numbers and shapes were interchangeable to the Greeks.

* The Romans' biggest contribution to mathematics was the murder of Archimedes. And they were the ones who didn't admit the existence of negative numbers. Ouch.

* Even Descartes, who formed the Cartesian plane, didn't admit negative numbers existed.

* Pascal used probability to justify having faith in God.

* A whole bunch of stuff about black holes and event horizons and wormhole theory and string theory that I understood well enough to understand it but not well enough to explain it.

And finally, in Appendix A, it is proven that

* Winston Churchill was a carrot.